Some of these optical elements might be arranged to modify the wavelengths of the emitted light (e.g. phosphor materials embedded in an transparent optical film or board) and/or some other optical elements (e.g. lenses, prisms, etc.) might be designed to modify the direction and/or shape of the emitted light rays—for example, to output a specific asymmetrical light distribution—and/or some other optical elements (e.g. lenses, prisms, etc.) might be designed to mix light emitted by different LEDs—especially if optical elements facing several LEDs of different colors.
Today, many of such LED-driven light systems are available on the market, giving multiple possibilities for the designer to reach desired multiple light effects.
Due to these high number of possible configurations, the modular approach, using the aforementioned optical modules (having each specific optical properties for a limited number of LEDs), allows to build various lighting systems, by assembling these optical modules together, side-by-side, giving more flexibility in the design conception than the previous approaches (made of single integral optical boards). This modular architecture is especially useful for lighting systems having: a high number of LEDs and/or different kinds of output light patterns.
Moreover this modular architecture can be performed from a limited number of types of modules, if similar optical modules are used in a single lighting system. Therefore one can imagine designing different lighting systems from optical boards having similar configurations and/or sizes. In particular, it would be advantageous to standardize these types of optical boards to be used in lighting systems, so as to reduce further the number of types of optical boards. These optical boards may therefore be industrially manufactured in massive quantities, decreasing the price per piece. Moreover the management of the stock would be easier since less references would have to be stored.
Nevertheless, these optical modules have to assembled side-by-side, and this assembly has to be sufficiently reliable to be industrially implementable.